In recent years, considerable effort has been devoted to the development of methods of teaching reading skills. Unfortunately, most of the conventional methods, including known computer based methods, focus on a single technique for teaching all readers, ignoring the fact that each student has different strengths and weaknesses.
Research by experts in the field has demonstrated the need for a balanced approach to reading instruction. This balanced approach involves providing all of the basic skills necessary to develop effective reading skills, and is normally divided into three different program components: phonemic awareness, reading subskills, and reading comprehension.
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual speech sounds called phonemes, and to read successfully words are broken down into sounds, for example the word “cat” is broken down into the separate phonemes: /k/, /a/, and /t/.
Reading subskills incorporate several concepts including automaticity and reading subtypes. A task-based, analytic approach is used to deliver both the assessment and intervention requirements to remediate students with reading disabilities or those wishing to accelerate skill development. This overall approach creates a structural and sequential methodology for effectively addressing poor decoding and component reading skills that ultimately leads to improvements in reading comprehension.
The final phase of the training involves reading comprehension, which challenges the students to use the skills learned in the two previous phases in comprehension exercises.
The implementation of such a balanced reading program comes at a cost. For most teachers, assigning and modifying training for a small group of students is manageable. The proliferation of computers and an increased identification of students with reading difficulties make the small group environment much less commonplace.
Typically, this new atmosphere requires educators to sacrifice program efficiency in order to accommodate more students. In order to maintain the efficacy of a balanced approach to reading instruction in a computer lab with 20 or more workstations, the teacher's role as technical, and pedagogical administrator must be significantly re-aligned. If it is not, teachers run the risk of providing incomplete, unbalanced and inconsistent instruction.
The more basic principles of teaching reading skills have been known for some time. However, the most effective way of implementing these principles into a classroom or computer laboratory setting, so that a large number of students at a variety of different reading levels can reap the full benefit of these principles, is still under study.
In the aforementioned and related US Patent a computer based method of teaching reading skills to students is described. In one aspect, the invention comprises the steps of determining which one of a series of predetermined training streams is appropriate for the student, based on the student's grade level; providing a series of phonemic awareness exercises; providing a series of reading subskill exercises; providing a series of reading comprehension exercises; running on a computer the appropriate training stream, which includes: alternating between at least one phonemic awareness exercise and at least one reading subskill exercise until all of the phonemic awareness exercises are mastered; alternating between at least one reading subskill, exercise and at least one reading comprehension exercise until all of the reading subskill exercises are mastered; and mastering remaining reading comprehension exercises; wherein a pre-determined level of mastery must be achieved on each exercise before proceeding to the next exercise.
It is generally understood that reading ability is the key to a student's success in all aspects of the educational experience. As expectations of a student's achievements increases and the scope of the standard curriculum expands the need for students to be able to read at grade level or better is more important than ever.
For these reasons a reading program, to be effective, should be able to assess accurately and quickly the strengths and weaknesses of each student's reading abilities so that the training components of the program address the individual needs of each student. In this regard, an individualized training program should respond specifically and automatically to each student's needs on an individual basis based on training performance. Once the assessment phase has been completed and the individualized training plan assigned the instructional phase must ensure that each student is fully informed of the training methodology and has an opportunity to train without the added pressure of being judged on results. A further important component of the program is intervention whereby both strengths and weaknesses are recognized automatically and appropriate action taken. System intervention, in this way, means that a student can progress through the training program at a rate that is best suited to his/her needs and without needing a teacher's direct involvement. This action may result in acceleration of the training stream if a student has demonstrated mastery at an early stage or simplifying program criteria in the case where a student has demonstrated difficulty in grasping a concept. In all cases the teacher or instructor is provided feed back, but actual, hands-on intervention is only required in extreme cases.